


The Ghost Boys of Harlan County

by scioscribe



Category: Justified
Genre: Backstory, Friendship, Gen, Kid Fic, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-01
Updated: 2016-10-01
Packaged: 2018-08-18 19:07:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8172629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Raylan had made friends before, but they were always coming back to him the next day and saying how their parents had told them that a Givens would lead them to no good fortune, and so by now he was cautious of the whole venture. He stuck his hands in his pockets and tried very hard to look like what the boy was doing was no concern of his at all, but then he spoiled it by saying, “Hey.” He then desperately tried to look disinterested.(Wherein Raylan and Boyd meet as kids and Raylan gains additional reasons to hate his father.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Canonical child abuse (referenced) and neglect.
> 
> Plus, you know, child characters written by an author with no real familiarity with children besides what she remembers from her own kid days. To be fair, though, who knows what a little Boyd Crowder would plausibly sound like?

Raylan’s daddy dropped him in the yard and told him to stay put, so of course Raylan wandered off as much as he dared. It was his intention to cross the street at least—the _back_ street, for added confusion—but when he got to the edge of the backyard he saw another boy crouched down playing and forgot all his plans.

Raylan had made friends before, but they were always coming back to him the next day and saying how their parents had told them that a Givens would lead them to no good fortune, and so by now he was cautious of the whole venture. He stuck his hands in his pockets and tried very hard to look like what the boy was doing was no concern of his at all, but then he spoiled it by saying, “Hey.” He then desperately tried to look disinterested. He stared at his shoelaces. “I’m Raylan Givens,” he said to his shoelaces. He’d decided it was best to get the Givens bit out of the way so they’d know, and then nobody would have to waste any of their time.

“I’m Boyd Crowder,” the boy said. He looked up at Raylan with eyes that looked like the green and brown in them were fighting. “You want to play soldiers?”

“You don’t have no soldiers, though.”

“Well, I did have, but Bowman chewed on ‘em all. I’m using x’s and o’s now because my momma says even Bowman can’t chew on anything you draw in the dirt. It ain’t so bad.”

Raylan in fact lacked GI Joes himself, and considered x’s and o’s to be an excellent idea. “Okay.” He got down in the dirt beside Boyd.

“You can be the Joes,” Boyd said generously, “and I will be the aliens.”

As it happened, the GI Joes held their hill until almost the last man, whereupon their general, as represented by an increasingly disfigured star shape, announced the discovery of an anti-matter ray that blasted the aliens to pieces. They died in a long, drawn-out agony that allowed Boyd many speeches and death scenes. When he was dusty all over from falling back into the dirt at the end of each one, he sat up, rubbed the grass off his face, and said, “Raylan, you got a chocolate bar?”

“Half,” Raylan said cautiously. He was not by nature an ungenerous boy, and he already thought that Boyd was his best friend in the whole world, probably, but Mags had given him the chocolate bar, and as getting one was not a daily occurrence, he’d thought to save it and so had been rationing it out piece by piece. It was acquiring a certain amount of lint and squishiness being in his pocket all the time, though, and thinking of that made him feel that his momma would be ashamed of him for being so unchristian as to refuse his best friend the last part of his candy bar, so he fetched it out and gave it to Boyd, feeling very dignified in his sacrifice.

Boyd ate it all almost at once. Raylan was pretty sure he swallowed some of the lint with it. When he was done, he turned the wrapper inside out and licked it, which was a thing Raylan had never thought to do before but which excited him as a future prospect.

He was not sure whether to be offended or amazed. He settled on the latter. “You must’ve been hungry.”

“I ain’t had breakfast.”

“You mean lunch,” Raylan said, since it was a quarter past three at least. Raylan had learned to tell time by the sun not so long ago; he was very proud of this and hoped Boyd would ask him about it.

But Boyd only said, “That either.” Then, after a painstaking pause, “Thank you for the chocolate, Raylan.”

Raylan considered no breakfast and no lunch. “My daddy keeps a pack of peanuts in his truck.”

Hope dawned bright in Boyd’s eyes. “Will he notice them gone?”

He likely would, but Raylan had decided to be brave. “He won’t notice a damn thing.” Saying _damn_ helped him feel brave, and also a little like he would go to hell. It made for a strange sensation in the pit of his stomach. He bounded up. “Come on, let’s go get them.”

He raced Boyd to the truck and then he got the peanuts out of the glove compartment and they leaned against the front bumper while Boyd ate, sucking the salt off his fingertips.

“You should ask your momma to make you some sandwiches,” Raylan said, with the wisdom of long experience, “like with peanut butter? So even if your daddy doesn’t pay the bills on time, you have things to eat.”

Boyd stuck his tongue into the plastic peanut bag. “My momma’s sick. That’s why I ain’t had nothing to eat. Bowman, he went to stay with my aunt, my cousin Johnny’s momma, but she didn’t want two extra kids, so I stayed with my daddy. It’s not so bad except he forgets about food ‘cause he goes out sometimes and doesn’t come back always when you think he will.”

Raylan processed this. “Your momma hospital sick?”

“She was, but they sent her home again.”

“Well, that’s good.”

Boyd shook his head. “The bad kind of coming home. She just sleeps all the time. Daddy says she’s gonna—” and then he turned away from Raylan. He had that shivery, teeth-clenched fierce look that Raylan knew from the mirror meant that he wanted to cry but didn’t want to cry all at the same time. He gave Boyd privacy by looking up at the sky and whistling the theme from _The Jeffersons_. He knew that Boyd meant his momma was going to die.

Raylan knew about dead mothers because they were in most of his books. He had been somewhat disappointed to learn that fathers died hardly ever, and when they did, they were almost always the ones that had been nice—this usually gutted him to the point where he walked around the house clutching the book, half in tears.

Still, books were one thing and friends were another, and Raylan was politely horrified by the thought of a real mother being lost. Mothers were _necessary_. “If she does die,” he said, saying it so Boyd didn’t have to, “you can’t stay here with just your daddy.”

“No,” Boyd agreed. They both knew that fathers were insufficient in the long run, maybe even undesirable. “I will run away and live in the woods and hunt deer with my daddy’s rifle, but I’ll come back and visit you sometimes and we can play soldiers again.”

Boyd had consistently nice ways of putting things, but Raylan had a better idea. “You can come and live with us if you want.” He already had a best friend’s firm belief that no one could possibly find his friend tiresome, and so suspected that even Arlo wouldn’t have a problem letting Boyd stay. Boyd would help him do the dishes and they could maybe build a treehouse and both of them would always have enough to eat. “My momma’s real nice. My daddy’s kind of mean, but—” Raylan’s momma and Aunt Helen both had told him that it wasn’t fair to say something unkind about someone without giving it a good tail to wag behind it, so he scrambled for something nice to say about Arlo. “But once he gave me a box of animal crackers,” he finished both diplomatically and triumphantly.

Boyd rubbed at his face. “Animal crackers are nice.”

“I don’t know that he’d do it often, though,” Raylan said hastily, to be fair. “But I got bunk beds, ‘cause my daddy knew a man who was selling them cheap ‘cause the ladders kept breaking off—”

“Did anyone die?” Boyd asked interestedly.

That had been Raylan’s question, too. “No,” he said, disappointed. “But there was a girl bashed her head. My momma says a bashed head can kill you sometimes. So she _could_ have.”

Boyd nodded, accepting that as reasonable consolation.

“Anyway, if you climb up on the table and then jump up on the top, you don’t hardly need the ladder at all, so you could have the top if you wanted.” He felt that was only fair, since Boyd had let him be the one to win the game. When they played at school, if anybody even let him in the game at all, Raylan always had to be the loser and get poked with sticks and people’s fingers until he laid down all bruised and dead, which he always had to do seven or eight times a game, and he wasn’t allowed any speeches about it, either. Then it occurred to him that if Boyd moved in, they’d be going to the same school, and they’d have their own game.

“Please, Boyd. Please say you’ll stay with us.”

“And we’ll be friends?” Boyd said.

“Sure,” Raylan said, confused. “We’re friends now, ain’t we? I let you have my chocolate bar.”

“That’s so,” Boyd said. He chewed on his lower lip. Raylan wondered if he were hungry enough to go on and eat it.

He felt like his heart was being crushed with every second Boyd hesitated. It was hateful. “You don’t want to,” he said. “You’re no friend. I let you have my daddy’s peanuts and he’ll whip me for that, and you won’t even come and stay.”

“Raylan,” Boyd said, “of course I want to come and stay. I want to be your friend. You’re _my_ friend.”

“Best friend?”

“ _Best_ friend. You’re the only friend I got, anyway, ‘cause Cousin Johnny don’t count. I just don’t know that my daddy will let me. And,” he said in a rush, “I don’t want you to get a whipping, you shouldn’t have let me have them peanuts if your daddy’s gonna do that, I wasn’t real bad hungry, Raylan.”

“You were so. And peanuts are stupid anyway. He just likes them ‘cause they go with beer.”

He pondered Boyd’s situation. He would agree that fathers could stop you from doing things even if you wanted to do them more than anything else in the world, and if Boyd’s daddy and Raylan’s daddy knew each other, it wasn’t like Boyd’s daddy wouldn’t know where Boyd had gone. Raylan could hide him in his closet and sneak him food, but he’d tried that once with a hound pup he’d found, and his daddy said that only a fool boy would keep a pup in his closet, since it would shit everywhere and eat them out of house and home. Probably a boy would be even harder to hide than a puppy, and he really didn’t want Arlo to drown Boyd in the creek if he got found.

The weight of being a kid settled over him.

“Oh, hell,” he said, which Boyd gave a respectful silence to. “Can’t you ask your daddy, at least? Don’t he say yes to anything?”

“Of course,” Boyd said, with tremendous loyalty and dignity. “He’s not so bad.”

Raylan was unfamiliar with gradations of fathers and assumed everyone was like his unless told otherwise. Boyd not being specific, he was still unsure of what he was dealing with. Still, he felt a little better. Even Arlo sometimes let him have things. He had brought him the box of animal crackers, after all, and Boyd would be no trouble, not nearly so much as a dog would have been. He was somewhat cheered.

He basked in his new friendship a little, like it was a sunny afternoon. “Want to play something else?”

“Cowboys and sheriffs?”

Raylan had never played cowboys and sheriffs before, but he liked how it sounded. “Cowboys and sheriffs. With a quick draw.”

“Guns?”

Raylan pointed his index finger straight at Boyd’s heart and kicked his hand back with the recoil. “Bang,” he said, grinning.

Boyd obligingly died and then got up again. “Are you the sheriff or the outlaw?”

“You mean the cowboy?”

Boyd frowned. He had imagined himself into a corner. Plainly, he wanted there to be outlaws, but that was not what the game was called.

Raylan, watching Boyd’s face go through its contortions, decided that outlaws sounded reasonably exciting, and in any case would give them more shooting to do, so he said that the cowboys were rustling cattle from the men they rode for, making them also outlaws, and Boyd lit up like fireworks. They decided to take turns on who was the outlaw and who was the sheriff, and they spent the rest of the afternoon wildly killing and outdrawing each other. It was dusk by the time Raylan fell back onto the grass like it was a bed and Boyd fell down with him.

“Are we both dead?” Raylan asked.

“I don’t recollect. I also don’t know who I was last.”

“I think you were an outlaw.”

“I ache all over,” Boyd said, “and there is a mosquito bite on your nose, Raylan.”

Raylan scratched his nose. He was tired, too. Maybe next they could play a game with more sitting. They could play Go Fish or Crazy Eights if they had cards, but they didn’t—could they imagine them? He’d never tried. He’d never had anybody to play with for this long before.

Then his daddy called him and he popped up like a jackrabbit. He felt cold all over. “Boyd,” he said, “let’s run off. Right now.”

“ _Raylan_!”

“My momma,” Boyd said, hesitating.

“We’ll come back and get her, my momma, too. But let’s leave. I hate my daddy, and you ain’t got nothing to eat here.”

“All right,” Boyd said. He squared his jaw. This seemed to be a prospect he believed in more than a life spent sleeping in Raylan’s top bunk, and Raylan believed it, too: there were no happy endings to be got by going home. Running away was better. “We’ll run into the woods and we’ll climb a tree and we’ll wait till dark to climb down and then we’ll get, and they’ll never find us, Raylan, never, we’ll be the ghost boys of Harlan county—”

Then Arlo pulled Raylan up by his shirt collar and held him like that, the neck of the shirt digging into him, choking him for an instant before Arlo set him down on his feet. “What in hell do you think you’re doing out here, boy? This ain’t your property and I told you to wait out front.”

“Yes, sir,” Raylan said. _I hate you_ , he thought. “Out front for hours and hours with nothin’ to do. I was playing with Boyd.”

“ _Boyd_?” It was like Arlo hadn’t even noticed that there was another boy there.

“Hello, Mr. Givens,” Boyd said politely. “You were in with my daddy?”

“Boyd _Crowder_ , oh, I see. Well, yes, Boyd, I was _in with your daddy_ , and you should know that _your daddy_ is a mean, selfish, cheap son-of-a-bitch whose stranglehold on this county is going to leave us all gasping and weeping before our time is through. A boy should know the truth about his father.”

Boyd went away somewhere then, Raylan thought: he could tell, being Boyd’s best friend and all. Boyd refused to know anything about his father. Raylan wanted to learn how to just be _not there_ like that, as unreachable as if you’d gotten yourself sealed up in some glass box where nothing touched you. It was a good trick. But he couldn’t ask Boyd then, because Arlo was already dragging him by the arm back towards the truck, and he would find the missing peanuts, and Raylan would get a whipping—but he’d met Boyd, there was that—and his feet kept slipping on the grass trying to keep up, and he was wrenching his neck trying to get a look back. He could still see what was left of their soldiers game drawn in the dirt.

Boyd came back to life as neatly as he had before and ran after them suddenly. “Mr. Givens, will you come back to see my daddy again?”

“I expect so,” Raylan’s daddy said. His mouth looked like a coin purse with the strings drawn up. “Can’t hardly avoid it.”

“Will you bring Raylan with you?”

And Raylan’s daddy smiled. It was his lizard smile. Raylan knew that it didn’t love him, and it didn’t mean him any good. He started to cry, which was stupid and awful, but he couldn’t help it. Arlo smacked him on the ear and flung him into the truck. He had it started up before Raylan could even right himself and then they were off the dirt drive and onto the road.

“You don’t cry,” Arlo said, as grim a pronouncement as Raylan had ever heard in his short life: not a warning but a description that had better be true, if he knew what was good for him. “And you don’t see that Crowder boy again.”

“I hate you,” Raylan whispered. He couldn’t even see the Crowder house behind them anymore.

His daddy seemed to think that was funny. “Do you.”

“You’re mean and nobody likes you and nobody ever played with me but Boyd because of the way you are. They think I’m like you, but I’m not.” _And Boyd and I are going to run off in the woods and one day I’ll come back and kill you_ , but of course he didn’t say that: he had never believed in saying his prayers out loud.

“No,” his daddy said, “you’re not like me. You know what you are?”

And suddenly Raylan forgot everything else in the world and just wanted his daddy to love him. He would have forgiven him anything. He would have forgiven him everything. He waited with his chest so tight he could hardly stand it.

“You’re _weak_ ,” his daddy said, like it was nothing but truth, and everyone could see it.

They drove the rest of the way home in silence.

(For weeks afterwards, Raylan would think, _I have a friend, his name is Boyd Crowder_ right before he fell asleep. But Arlo never did take him back to the Crowder house again, and Boyd slipped away from him, like a dream he’d had that had seemed good and real while he was in it but just didn’t exist in the real world, however much he wished for it.

When he was nineteen, and digging coal, he met a boy his age with bright hazel eyes, and Raylan held out his hand to him: “Raylan Givens,” he said, immune after all those years to the looks he would get when they heard.

Something passed over the other man’s face so fast Raylan couldn’t tell what it was, but it didn’t look like the same old appraisal, the look to tell if Raylan had grabbed for his wristwatch instead of his hand. He shook. “Boyd Crowder,” he said. “Didn’t you and I—”

But the mine was loud and there wasn’t much time to talk. They worked their way deeper in, and by the time Raylan thought to ask Boyd what he’d been about to say, Boyd too had forgotten.)


End file.
